145765 - Implement a “smart quotes” typing converter

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Greg K.]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0rc2)
Gecko/20020510
BuildID:    2002051005

An option should be available to automatically convert hash marks (' and ") to
true quotes and apostrophes in Composer.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Type hash marks (foot and inch marks, ' and ") in a Composer document.

Actual Results:  Hash marks remained hash marks.

Expected Results:  The hash marks should have been converted to true quotes
and/or apostrophes.

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

This is something that ATSUI AAT may automatically provide under Mac OS X. See
bug 105800.

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

Might this depend on the work in bugs like bug 24861?

Comment 3

[David A. Wheeler]

This is a good point. Text entry (e.g., in Composer)
should by default insert smart quotes.  DON'T insert the
non-standard Microsoft characters (e.g., from charset windows-1252),
because they don't work everywhere.  Instead,
for left and right double quotation marks, use
& #8220; and & #8221; - and for
left and right single quotation marks (and apostrophes), use
& #8216; and & #8217;

This should be optional (controlled by preferences).  Usually, you
want smart quotes, but sometimes (e.g., when discussing code) you
want just straight quotes.  The algorithm can be simple:
if at the beginning of a paragraph or after whitespace, use a left quote,
otherwise use a right quote.

More stuff about curling quotes is at:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/quotes-in-html.html

Comment 4

[David A. Wheeler]

Oh, note that in composer, the pull-down for symbols should also
let users pick the various quote marks (as well as showing their names,
since in some old X windows fonts they look the same).

Comment 5

[David A. Wheeler]

I don't think this should be tied with bug 24861.
Bug 24861 is interested in the <q> tag.
However, if someone types the " or ' character, it's not
clear they meant to use the <q> tag; (indeed, for ' they often don't mean it).
Especially since there are still many systems that don't handle <q>.
It _IS_ clear that they meant that character, so translating it
to a &#8820; and so on is valid (and that works on FAR more tools).

Comment 6

[Kathleen :Brade]

reassign to new account

Comment 7

[Greg K.]

I wonder if OpenOffice has any code that could be borrowed into Mozilla for
this. Would there be any licensing issues?

Comment 8

[Greg K.]

Not intended only for SeaMonkey, moving to Core and guessing Editor component.

Comment 9

[Heikki Vesalainen]

You really must remember i18n when you start implementing these kind of things. Different languages use different characters to mark a quotation and some (like Finnish) do not use curly quotes at all. What's more the character might not be standardized at all in some languages. For example in Finnish it is most common to use the straight quotes, i.e. U+0022, but it is equally correct to use the double angle quotation marks (U+00BB and U+00AB), although the later is normally only seen in books.

So don't implement any automation that is not a) i18n and b) configurable by the user.

Comment 10

[z0idberg]

This proposal is really old, but it is still important.

In every word processor (Word, Openoffice etc), Smart Quotes are automatically used. In English, I get “”, in German „“, in French «». 

But, because in recent times, everybody uses web content creation software like  Wordpress, more and more people write the text directly in the browser, with the effect that " has become the de facto standard on the web. I guess nowadays more people use Firefox than Word for writing texts.

It would be extremely good if Firefox could support smart quotes in text fields (like the ones where I am currently writing in). This would have a profound impact on typography on the web. Maybe other browser would follow. But even if not, at least Firefox users would write correctly.

_Please_ support this. This would be such a good feature. I don’t see that there is any customization necessary by the user (maybe only on/off). Of course, some languages have multiple ways to write (e.g. German has „“ and »«), but there is nothing wrong with just using one style.

Comment 11

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)]

I don't think this is reasonable feature request for the editor module because automatically inserting text causes unexpected DOM result for input or beforeinput event listeners. So, mainly for the backward compatibility, we should not support the feature in the editor module level.

On the other hand, it must be reasonable to implement that in application level, especially for Thunderbird. So, I move this to Thunderbird's component. I guess this can be implemented with input event listener and scanning preceding text in the paragraph to check whether it's an open quote.